shuddered and rode the deep swells. The kids had been in the movie theater and the adults had gone to their cabins. Liz was the first to knock on her mother’s door as the boat groaned under their feet.
“Are we sinking?” She looked panicked.
“No.” Olivia smiled reassuringly, but there was no denying the pitching and tossing was unpleasant, and the boat slammed hard with a frightening sound each time they fell into a deep trough after a swell. “I guess it’s just an unexpected windstorm,” her mother reassured her, but it had unnerved her a little too, although she didn’t get seasick. Liz was green.
“Should I put my life jacket on?” Liz asked with wide eyes.
“I don’t think so,” Olivia said calmly as Phillip walked into her cabin, looking concerned.
“Amanda’s feeling pretty sick. Do you think we should go back?” They were in the middle of open water halfway from Sardinia to Corsica, and that didn’t sound like a solution to Olivia, but there was no denying it was getting worse. The heavy boat was rolling like crazy.
“I’ll go talk to the captain,” Olivia said, trying not to look worried. Sarah and John appeared, and then all the kids found their way to Olivia’s suite as well. Crew members were walking through the halls, taking fragile objects off tables, and putting anything that might break on the floor. They looked busy, but not worried, which was reassuring.
“Shit, we’re sinking,” Liz said, as she grabbed her mother’s arm.
“We are?” Carole and Sophie looked at each other, and Carole started to cry.
“We’re not sinking, and if this were an emergency, the captain would have told us,” Olivia said above their voices as the boat continued to head into the troughs, hit hard, and shudder. “I’ll talk to the captain,” Olivia said firmly, and the entire group followed her to the wheelhouse, where the captain was watching the radar screens and adjusting several dials. He looked up apologetically as they entered.
“I’m sorry. It’s a mistral. I thought we would avoid it, but it came up earlier than expected.” The winds were fifty knots, and the boat was at the mercy of them now.
“Are we in danger?” Liz managed to croak out.
“Not at all. We’ll be in the shelter of land in two hours, and then it will be much better, although we will have strong winds for the next two days, but better seas.”
“Like this?” Sarah asked with a worried look, standing next to John.
“No, it will be calmer than this. It is just particularly bad here in the strait.”
“Should we go back to Porto Cervo?” Phillip inquired, thinking of Amanda sheet white and sick in their cabin.
“It would be the same. It will take us two hours to go back, or longer. We’ll be better off if we just move ahead. In two hours, you’ll feel better,” he assured them, and a few minutes later, Olivia led her troops to a sitting area on the same deck as her suite. The purser and two stewardesses offered them food and drink and all declined, and a few minutes later Liz disappeared and returned with her life jacket on.
“Just in case,” she said, and the others laughed, but it was no fun being on the stormy seas. The kids looked nervous and John and Sarah were worried. Only Phillip and Olivia seemed calm.
They sat together in the salon for two hours, and it was three hours before they benefited from the shelter of the Corsican coast. The sea was still rough but the winds died down a little, and finally they all went to their cabins to get some rest. The boat was pitching and rolling, but less. Liz asked her mother if she could sleep in her cabin, and she lay on Olivia’s bed, holding her hand, with her life jacket on.
It was morning before the winds calmed enough for the boat to stop rolling as violently. It had been quite a night! Those who could sleep woke up feeling better in Corsica the next day. The winds were strong, but the boat was much steadier than it had been the night before. They had set aside a day for swimming and fishing off Corsica, before night cruising again back to France, where they planned to spend the rest of the trip. They had been on board for a week by then and covered a lot of ground. They decided not to swim in the still turbulent sea. They spent a quiet day